The dramatic growth in smart phones and internet-enabled mobile devices, combined with the increasingly broad availability of travel itineraries, is re-shaping the travel experience. A variety of companies, including airlines, travel agencies, and mobile application developers, have begun to recognize opportunities that exist for enabling travelers to carry and interact with their travel itinerary on a mobile device. There is a need, however, to do more than simply provide users with travel itineraries on their mobile devices.
Providers of travel-related services often desire to communicate with travelers. For example, a travel agency may want to notify its customers that a portion of a tour package is temporarily unavailable and offer alternatives, or an airline may want to notify passengers scheduled for a particular flight that the there is a mechanical problem with the aircraft, and the flight will be delayed and moved to another gate. However, it may be difficult or impossible for providers of travel-related services to match relevant messages with respective travelers in a timely fashion. In many instances, certain providers may not have any access to traveler contact information or even a way to identify travelers. For example, an airport may want to notify travelers that a certain airport parking garage is unavailable for a specific period of time, but the airport does not know the identities or contact information for travelers catching a flight at the particular airport during the specific period. Further, users of personal communication devices are often inundated with a large number of messages (e.g., emails and/or SMS text messages), which may result in travel-related messages being missed or ignored by users until the message is no longer relevant.